Sorority flow: the rhetoric of sisterhood in post-network television

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the use of sororal discourse and imagery in post-network television, and situates this “rhetoric of sisterhood” within the broader traditions of both female-driven network programing and independent feminist filmmaking—as well as the more recent tradition of “Quality TV.” Taking as its primary case studies series including Big Little Lies, GLOW, Claws, Top of the Lake, Dietland, and Orange is the New Black, it argues that these shows invoke an aspirational ideal of sisterhood that at once recalls second-wave feminist discourse and updates it, by staging a more self-consciously intersectional vision of female solidarity. If these idealized ally narratives diverge from much previous feminist broadcast programming, in their willingness to prioritize politics over plausibility, this essay demonstrates their debts to the frankly polemical work of feminist filmmakers like Agnès Varda, Lizzie Borden, Marleen Gorris, and Julie Dash. At the same time, it suggests these displays of female kinship constitute a radical response to the punitive treatment of women that has come to dominate prestige TV. I conclude, then, by suggesting these shows constitute an important strain of counter-programming, which media scholars might use to complicate prevailing narratives of post-network TV that center so-called male anti-hero shows by factoring in these narratives of collective female heroics.